Discussion Questions and Summary

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technical director at EPIE Institute, a unit of Consumer Reports magazine, primarily responsible for testing the first generation of microcomputers to be used in schools. For two years, he appeared in the monthly PBS television program Educational Computing to discuss the application of microcomputers in educational applications. After a former professor asked Lou to work with him on client projects, Lou became a full-time instructional design consultant working on long-term projects at Minolta, AT&T, Lucent Technologies, and Avaya. He’s now in a partnership designing electronic performance support systems with Christensen Roberts Solutions and is currently working on a large-scale EPSS project at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Lou finds reading books and interviewing experts in the field to be the best way for him to continue to grow in the field of HPI. He likes to participate in webinars. He rarely goes to formal training, but spends a lot of time exploring websites that feature good articles and information on the latest trends and research in HPI. When Lou was asked what he found most rewarding about his career as an HPI practitioner, Lou said, “The promise that I’m going to make a difference.”

When asked, Joe Monaco will tell you that he has been doing performance improvement his entire life. He couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t constantly trying to improve upon some outcome by improving or fixing its process. For Joe, it seemed natural to always looking for ways to do things better. He believes his vantage point is one he learned growing up in the family bakery business, where opportunities for improvement were abundant. He always naturally worked from a systems view of things. In an early job as a production supervisor for a large paint company, he began to experiment. From that job, he moved on to become an operations trainer for a large cosmetics company. He was responsible for all operations training—from designing industrial skills to delivering supervisory and management practices training. Discovering instructional design models for the first time, Joe started developing formal ways to do things that he had been thinking about and experimenting with for years. Soon thereafter, Joe read Robert Mager’s work and was turned on to performance improvement. He eventually adopted the performance improvement vantage points of notable contributors such as Tom Gilbert, Geary Rummler, Joe Harless, Ogden Lindsley, and William R. Daniels.

In his career, he never felt limited to instructional design. Joe could always see the big picture and the systems view of things. Back then, there wasn’t a lot of formal performance management processes in place. It basically worked like this: “I’ll pay you and you will do what I say.” Joe introduced a different approach: “If you just train people in the expected methods, provide them with adequate resources, and get them talking to each other about the work, they’ll go out and do the stuff.” And he found a way to convince the supervisors that it was all their idea. His method was to perform detailed performance/process analysis by interviewing the very people who needed to change their own way of doing things. His early lessons were that you had to use data that people already had about themselves; and that people were more likely to follow new process “rules” if they derived the rules from that data.

Joe spent 10 years heading up a corporate OD and training department where he was able to work throughout the organization. He reported to French executives, which posed some interesting challenges and unique opportunities. The French business executives were cautious, if they didn’t just flat-out reject “flavor-of-the-month” interventions. They were too serious for that. But they would easily embrace and support new initiatives that were clearly intended to improve upon the core process or the effectiveness of their organization. Joe says, “For me, that focused business perspective was like being in performance improvement heaven.” Joe would share with them what other companies like IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and others were doing, but the French managers were unimpressed. He took a lot of risks to continue to implement performance improvement strategies, mostly because the strategies required persuading the non-French managers who were used to seeing flavor-of-the-month offerings and had come to expect it. Fortunately, Joe’s boss was a power broker in the company with lots of influence. Joe began to work primarily as a personal consultant for his boss. When his boss returned to France, Joe admitted, “I enjoyed more autonomy than anyone should.” There was continued pressure for him to move into the HR function,

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but he felt strongly that he needed to reside in operations. He next reported to the chief financial officer (CFO). This became challenging, as this boss was mostly

focused on the financial costs for all training initiatives, with little apparent interest in organizational process. Because the CFO was very demanding from the financial point of view, Joe says that he was forced to learn things about corporate finance that he eventually embraced as a unique and welcomed contribution to his own perspective. His new boss stopped in one day and announced that during the last board meeting, Joe’s location on the organizational chart was called into question. Joe was told that from now on, his department would be reporting to HR. This was a mismatch from the beginning. Joe knew he was in trouble during his first meeting, when he asked the top HR manager to discuss objectives—only to find that he didn’t have any he was willing to share. Joe was convinced that the HR manager didn’t believe it was the proper role of his new subordinate to focus their reporting relationship in